How Obama's Gun Proposals Are Faring On Capitol Hill

Of the four things President Obama urged Congress to pass at his
gun control speech Thursday, background checks seem like the
least unpopular.

While most of Obama's proposed gun regulations are polling well
with the public, they are not nearly as popular in
Congress.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has suggested he
didn't see the value in passing legislation he didn't think could
pass the House. House Speaker John Boehner's
spokesman said Wednesday
that committees would "review" Obama's proposals, "And if the
Senate passes a bill, we will also take a look at that." And
those are the merely noncommittal.

On Fox & Friends Thursday, Florida Sen. Marco
Rubio said Obama was just using the Newtown shooting to do
something he'd wanted all along. Rubio explained:

"The impetus for all of this was the shooting in Connecticut,
right? That's what led to this. And yet nothing he’s proposing
would have prevented Connecticut... This is stuff they've
always wanted to do, and now this has created the political
climate to pursue it."

Speaking to Bill
O'Reilly the night before, Rubio said,
"I think that the president – and he doesn’t have the guts to
admit it – is not a believer of the Second Amendment."

An assault weapons ban, as well as a limit on the size of
magazines, doesn't seem to have enough fans to pass. Red-state
Democrats who had seemed open to gun control were not that
thrilled with Obama's proposals. West Virginia Sen. Joe
Manchin, who recently said you don't need a 10-round magazine
to hunt deer, told reporters he would have preferred it if Obama
had created some kind of commission to study gun violence. He
said he would consider the details of Obama's
proposals, Roll
Call reports.

Montana Sen. Max
Baucus sounded skeptical, too, saying, "Before passing new
laws, we need a thoughtful debate that respects responsible,
law-abiding gun owners in Montana instead of one-size-fits all
directives from Washington." The
Hill's Alexander Bolton reports that gun-rights
advocates in Montana "still have not forgiven Baucus for backing
the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban." Gary Marbut, president of
the Montana Shooting Sports Association, told The Hill,
"There’s no confusion on Max’s part what heavy sledding he would
have in 2014 if he voted for gun control now."

So what might actually get done? New York Sen. Chuck
Schumer said in a statement,
"If you look at the combination of likelihood of passage and
effectiveness of curbing gun crime, universal background checks
is at the sweet spot." Republican Rep. Robert Goodlatte,
chair of the House Judiciary Committee, seemed to agree.

Goodlatte said he opposes an assault weapons ban,
he said
on C-SPAN, "But in terms of background checks, in terms of
keeping weapons out of the hands of criminals and people who have
serious mental health difficulties, we want to do that, and we
would take a close look at that." While this would be only a part
of what the president proposed, as The
Washington Post's Brad Plumer explains, crime experts
think universal background checks could potentially have a large
impact on crime. As much as 80 percent of guns used in crime were
purchased on the secondary market.